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Markim Felix
Professor Lago
Experiences in Literature
May 1, 2014
Reading in the Digital Age
Ever wonder how much harder reading may have been before our generation? Reading in
the digital age is very different than the past indeed. We never actually sit and think about it, but
Im sure there are times were we all have read something that didnt make sense to us. We
usually go ahead and Google the meaning. Reading in this time period has affected our grammar
and reading, school performance, but has made research a lot easier. After reading My Papas
Waltz by Theodore Roethke and Daddy by Sylvia Plath, I had to do my research because
some things simply did not make sense to me. The library is becoming less useful to us as the
digital age has taken its place and gives us information instantaneously. Being born in 1993 I
was able to see how reading has changed. If I never knew what a word mean my mother would
simply tell me to grab the dictionary, now I simply pull my phone out my pocket and search the
word, its that easy now.
The internet has helped me understand the major themes in the poems, like family for
example. Shmoop.com explains how family is a major theme in My Papas Waltz. To some
people they may read the poem and see it as the most perfect family, being that the little boy is
dancing around with his father in the kitchen. To some people they may see a family being torn
apart because of alcohol abuse (Shmoop Editorial Team). The first line of the poem states clearly
there is alcohol involved when the narrator states The whiskey on your breath could make a
small boy dizzy. (494). No ones family is perfect and in My Papas Waltz the young boy
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shows proof that he loves his abusive drunken father But I hung on like death: (494). Another
theme that shmoop.com explained to me was admiration, even though the child keeps getting his
ear scraped by his dads belt he still clings to his father (494). Men in masculinity is the third
theme, the father is described as having rough knuckles and a palm caked with dirt (494, 495)
this shows masculinity. The child doesnt pay attention to his mother watching them in the
kitchen which shows that he understands the differences between gender and masculinity
(Shmoop Editorial Team). If it wasnt for the internet its self I probably would have only guessed
the first theme, which is family.
In Daddy by Sylvia Plath shmoop.com states one of the themes as being mortality;
mortality because the narrator of the poem is obsessed with the fact that her father is dead she is
also obsessed with her own death as a way to be reunited with her father (Shmoop Editorial
Team). Supernatural can also be a theme because when she refers to Daddy she is referring to
her father who is a ghost because he is no longer living (Shmoop Editorial Team). Gender I
would think is the most important theme because its not just a poem directed to her father and
husband, but the relationship some women have with men in general (Shmoop Editorial Team).
Im not the best at comprehending poems which is how shmoop.com helped a lot when it
came to understanding the themes of both poems. The research I did to find the themes of the
poems took not even one minute for me to find! Now imagine being in school before the digital
age, it may have taken someone twenty minutes or more just to figure out a theme in the poem.
Technology is becoming smarter and smarter than the average human being every day and my
generation tends to rely on it. Why exactly do we rely on it though? Would you rather spend
hours in the local library or school library or would you rather just sit in front of a computer or
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phone and have the information you need in just a couple of minutes. Thats why my generation
depends on it so much.
We may not notice I but the digital age is affecting our grammar and reading skills as
well. As of now I try to use iMessage as much as possible. With iMessage you can type a full
text message without having to worry about running out of characters. In regular text messages
you have a limited amount of characters you can use in a text which then forces you to shorten
and abbreviate words. When we shorten words so much we get used to writing things like u
instead of you and idek instead of I dont even know. Although I know the difference
between them, I still sometimes find myself typing the text version of a word instead of the
actual word in my papers which can set me back when it comes time to grade. My Papas
Waltz was an easy poem to understand, however Daddy at first I thought I wasnt reading
some words correctly or whether they were in a different language. Thats when I put two and
two together and figured since the narrators father was German maybe she was speaking
German. I turned out to be right when I did my research. A native English speaker before the
digital age would have either have to ask someone who spoke German if they even knew it was
German. In the digital age we can simply type something into a translator, its that easy. For
example when the narrator says A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen I had no clue what a
Dachau was Google showed me that it was a concentration camp during the holocaust. I
already knew Auschwitz is a city in Germany.
Of course since the digital age can affect the way we read and write it also affects the
way we perform in school. In high school nine out of ten of my class papers were written with
normal pen and paper. In college every paper you type is done on a word processor. In high
school I was able to learn from my mistakes when I wrote my essays on pen and paper. When I
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type my papers on word processors sometimes Im looking down at the keyboard and would
never know if I misspelled a word because there is autocorrect. Going into my junior year of
college I just recently wrote my first handwritten paper in a very long time since high school and
that was actually my best paper I did in the entire semester.
My Papas Waltz and Daddy are very similar poems and I would not have known
that without the internet. Of course I knew both poems had to do with fathers in general, but not
of abusive father. In My Papas Waltz it is very easy to get confused because there are signs of
abuse from the father but there are also signs of happiness. Usually when abused as a child, that
child is still going to be at that parents side because if there young they dont really know better.
Being young you wont really understand what it means to be a drunk which is why that poem
can be confusing to some.
The internet and technology has helped this generation. The digital age has made us both
smarter and less smart. We rely on its way to much that it affects the way we think. The digital
age has made us technology smart but less street smart in a way. If our phone brakes, nine out of
ten we know how to fix it. The fact that we dont have to spend hours in the library to do
research may affect us because we are not actually going through books and doing the research
on our own. We can now type a phrase into google and the first link that appears is usually the
link you need. We constantly have a teacher in our pockets to help us when we dont understand
a text or phrase but is it making us smarter? Maybe in the future technology will take a teachers
place like self-check outs are starting to do with cashiers.


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Shmoop Editorial Team. "My Papa's Waltz Themes"Shmoop.com. Shmoop University, Inc., 11
Nov. 2008. Web. 4 May 2014.
Shmoop Editorial Team. "Daddy Themes." Shmoop.com. Shmoop University, Inc., 11 Nov.
2008. Web. 4 May 2014
Roethke, Theodore My Papas Waltz. Literature and the Writing Process Ed. Elizabeth
McMahan Boston, MA: Pearson, 2012 (494-495)
Plath, Sylvia Daddy 12 Oct. 1962. Web 4 April, 2014
<https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/daddy>